Same thing happened to me. I was on a facetime with someone in Brooklyn, but I was a 2 hour drive north outside of NYC and it took what felt like 30 seconds to propagate over that 200km.
> "Bechtolsheim has agreed to pay a civil penalty of $923,740 for earning slightly more than half that for his illegal trades, and has also agreed to be barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years.
Forbes lists Bechtolsheim's net worth at somewhere north of $16 billion. The SEC fine is less than 0.006 percent of his holdings."
The fine seems reasonable. He disgorges the profits, and then gets fined twice what he earned and banned from serving on boards (worth far more than $1m over 5 years).
Big question for me is why was he doing crimes for such low stakes. It's like seeing a faang engineer rob a 7-11.
We should not be punishing people for what we think they might have done.
I suspect the SEC may now be taking a deeper look for other surprising trades that might be linked to him, and if it finds anything he did not disclose in the course of reaching the current agreement, it will not go down well.
I think its well documented that people are not necessarily rationale when making risk/reward payoffs. Also perhaps he is just bored! Hopefully lesson learnt for him.
To be fair, the punishment for shoplifting is often a slap on the wrist. I say this as someone who had a troubled youth and was caught shoplifting as a teenager. I got banned from the premises and no criminal charges even though the police did get involved.
If I had been an adult it undoubtedly would have been a tad harsher but unless the theft amounts to many thousands of dollars I don't think prison time is ever on the table. Even then I'd be surprised. We're not talking about grand theft auto, we're talking about shoplifting. So it's usually misdemeanour. If the merchandise is retrieved then it is returned to the store and the store can sue the guilty party recover to damages if it's worth it.
So I'm not really sure what kind of point you're trying to make. I think it's about inequality. I'm just not really sure how you get there by using shoplifting as your example.
Hey I think we both agree children should not be thrown in jail for shoplifting, or for insider trading.
If you shoplift anything of significance you might be looking at least a night in jail, but more importantly a criminal record. If you shoplift over the threshold of grand larceny you will absolutely be spending a bit of time in jail and will have a criminal record. These are virtually non-existent outcomes for insider trading, even though people "guilty" of insider trading are also thieves. Guilty in quotes because WTF knows, they are rarely criminally prosecuted.
So yeah, my point is generally about equality, but I was responding specifically to the casual "yeah that seems right" attitude about it.
I suspect that much of the time it's pretty ambiguous. It's widely known that a company is ripe for sale and you hear from someone you know "confidentially" that they're in pretty serious talks with $X. Maybe they're a lawyer or a banker or...
And, in general, non-execs are not prohibited from unscheduled trading in their own company's stock (though company rules may prohibit trading in options) but lots of people have a pretty good sense of how the quarter is going.
Shoplifting laws are occasionally not enforced. Financial crimes are only occasionally enforced. These things are asymmetric, and that is the whole gist of the argument.
I think the purpose of the fine is to disincentivize the behavior, not to sting necessarily. And to properly disincentivize the behavior it just has to make the behavior have negative expected value.
A fine of 2X profit is only negative expected value if the chance of getting caught is at least 50%. I'm very confident that the chance of getting caught is far less than 50%.
So you're saying that for a VC, where a common approach is to invest $1 million each in 100 different startups and if just two of them turn into $50 million then you break even, a fine like this is already factored into the game?
I wonder what the ROI difference is between the two gambles. 100 $1 million dollar bets returns $120 million? 20 $100000 insider trades returns $5 million - $1 million fines?
A 20% return is pretty good. But if it takes 2-3 years per startup, it's not as good. And it ties up $100 million.
A $2 million investment that pays out $4 million within a year is much more spectacular.
Edit: I am not accusing anybody of having made 20 insider trades. I am just musing about potential business models.
It’s significantly worse than OpenAIs offerings, and I’m tired of people pretending as though these models are totally interchangeable yet. They are not.
Is this robust enough to feed all your emails and chat logs into it and have convos with it? Will it be able to extract context to figure out questions to recent logs, etc?
How does this run on an Intel Mac? I have a 6 core i9. Haven't been able to get an M series yet so Im wondering if it would be more worth it to run it in a cloud computing environment with a GPU.
>Mac Running Intel
When running a Mac with Intel hardware (not M1), you may run into clang: error: the clang compiler does not support '-march=native' during pip install.
If so set your archflags during pip install. eg: ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" pip3 install -r requirements.txt
Oh, not this again. No, it's not a net negative in ALL forms. And if you really were concerned about downsides, AI has a ton more potential downsides than Web3 ever did, including human extinction, as many of its top proponents have come out and publicly said. Nothing even remotely close to that is the case for Web3 at all:
" many of its top proponents have come out and publicly said."
You don't have to uncritically accept that, it's far more likely that they're just self aggrandizing in a "wow I'm so smart my inventions can destroy the world, better give me more money and write articles about me to make sure that doesn't happen".
I see, so when it comes to the top experts in AI screaming “we made a mistake, please be careful” we should use nuance and actually conclude the opposite — that we should press ahead and they’re wrong.
But with Web3, we should just listen to a bunch of random no-name haters say “there are NO GOOD APPLICATIONS, trust us, period, stop talking about it”, use no nuance or critical thinking of our own, and simply stop building on Web3.
Do you happen to see the extreme double standard here you’re employing, while trying to get people to see things your way?
The crypto group had a lot of time and even more money to make a compelling product that took off and so far they've failed. We've watched fraud after fraud as they've shown themselves to just be ignorant and arrogant ideologues who don't understand how the "modern" finance system came to be, what the average user wants out of financial or social products, or just outright scammers. We can keep sinking money into a bottomless pit or we can move on and learn from their mistakes.
I didn't say to dismiss any concerns out of hand, but the whole idea of "x-risk" or "human extinction" from ai is laughable and isn't taken seriously by most people. Again if you think critically about the whole idea of "human extinction" from any of the technology being talked about you should see it as nonsense.
The AI crowd has been working for multile decades and only now has made progress that people care about. Also I’m pretty sure the “eye-watering amounts of money” Sam Altman referred to exceed what developers of even the crypto projects had, when they built eg Bitcoin or Ethereum. That’s what it took to make AI turn heads. Until AlphaGo you could also yell that AI has no real applications.
The personal computer crowd had hobbyists like Wozniak coming to meetups for decades and computers were the province of nerds, now everyone is addicted to them. Decades took place
You are like a person yelling at the video game industry: “pong and space invaders are a stupid waste of time with ugly graphics!! Don’t play or make video games!!” Until a few decades later we have Halo, Call of Duty etc.
I dunno, on the crypto side stablecoins are pretty compelling for hassle-free cross-border transfers—there’s $125bn in circulation, which to me means it’s taken off.
On the AI side, I mean for example it’s not laughable to think anybody on the planet could just feed a bunch of synthetic biology papers to a model and start designing bioweapons. It’s not hard to get your hands on secondhand lab equipment…
100% private? Hmm. I think with the amount of paranoia that the folks in power have about local LLM’s, I wouldn’t be in the slightest surprised that the Windows telemetry will be reporting back what people are doing with them. And anyone who thinks otherwise is in my view just absolutely naive beyond hope.
> The “orchestrator”... must and will live on. The only question is where. And the answer to that question will be one of the most consequential in data infrastructure in the next decade.
After playing with AutoGPT it's clear this is needed with orchestrating agents who recursively spawn new agents for delegating tasks. Anyone building this?
